FINISHING FUNDS 2009

The Experimental Television Center announces that Finishing Funds 2009 is supporting 18 electronic artists from around New York State whose work encompasses new media, film and sonic art, web projects, performances, installations, interactive projects, gaming and cinema software. For 20 years, the program has provided over $400,000 directly to artists, to assist with the completion of diverse and innovative projects which challenge the traditional boundaries of media and new media programming. Finishing Funds is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts and by mediaThe foundation. This year’s awards recognize work which is very diverse, encompassing interactive web projects, animation, generative systems, multi-disciplinary performances and include experimental, documentary and narrative cinema and the sonic arts. The works approach a wide variety of topics including health and environmental issues, the roles of memory and imagination in the creation of popular history, world financial and monetary systems, and the transformation of urban neighborhoods by rampant development. The works in progress have received recognition and support from other organizations including the New York State Council on the Arts, e-MobilArt Lab, Cycling 74, EMPAC, the Wexner Center, Eyebeam and Harvestworks. With an award in 2009 from mediaThe foundation, Finishing Funds is supporting an interactive installation by Thessia Machado. Recipients of Finishing Funds 2009 awards are Nurit Bar-Shai, Stefani Bardin, Zoe Beloff, Elan and Jonathan Bogarin, Todd Chandler, Reid Farrington, Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida, Stephanie Gray, Kathy High, Sawako Kato, Edward Kihn, Barbara Lattanzi, Shana Moulton and Nick Hallett, Diane Nerwen, Ruth Sergel, Karolina Sobecka, and Woody Sullender. This year’s peer review panel was composed of Renate Ferro of Ithaca and Tara Mateik of Brooklyn. Tara Mateik is an artist and educator living in New York City. In his videos and performances he typecasts himself as theoretical and cultural transvestites from pop music, competitive sport, and weird science. Mateik’s work has been exhibited at venues that include The Guggenheim Museum, LACE, British Film Institute and the Oberhausen Film Festival. In addition to his own work he has collaborated with collectives and artists including Paper Tiger Television video collective to produce short videos that demystify and democratize the media. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of Digital Cinema Studios in the Media Culture Department at CUNY Staten Island.

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Renate Ferro’s artistic practice involves critical interactivity incorporating emerging technologies with the social and theoretical structures of the psychological and sociological condition. Her work is represented in both corporate and private collections across the United States as well as in Canada, France, Germany and Australia. Her work has been published in such journals as Diacritics, Theatre Journal, and Epoch. She is currently a co-moderator for the online new media listserve -EMPYRE-soft-skinned space and the art editor of the journal DIACRITICS published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Renate Ferro is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Cornell University. The deadline for the program each year is March 15th. Applications are available online and from the Center in January.

Panelists Renate Ferro and Tara Mateik Program Director Sherry Miller Hocking

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FINISHING FUNDS 2008

Nurit Bar-Shai Brooklyn

The Grafting Parlor is a growing library - a collection of time-based media that is drawn from the natural world, offering encounters with the unfamiliar. Using both contemporary media technology and classical gardening techniques, the project has developed a system of living indicators.

Stefani Bardin Buffalo

The Omnivore's Pleasure is a trailer for a culture jam of a cooking show inspired by Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma which examines the ethical, chemical, political and ecological factors of our food productiion and food choices. The highly stylized and sexualized presentation of food in this commercial paradigm contrasts the harmful, wasteful, dangerous and repercussive practices of food cultivation and p roduction.

Zoe Beloff New York

Dreamland: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society is an exhibition celebrating the centennial of Freud's visit to Coney Island. The show features "dream films" made by members of the society, a working model of an amusement park designed to illustrate Freud's theories by Albert Grass, the visionary founder of the society, as well as drawings, letters and many unusual artifacts.

Elan and Jonathan Bogarin Brooklyn

Invisible Murals is a cautionary tale of the power of oil and a celebration of the stories and myths of the residents of El Tigre. In this oil-boom town, on the eastern plains of Venezuela, there exists an ever-changing cycle of murals that brings to life the stories of the city. Our film intercuts stop- motion animated murals and documentary footage to contrast the story of a living city with that of the black blood draining from the earth.

Experimental Television Center Finishing Funds 2009 3 Todd Chandler Troy

Flood is an experimental narrative film about a journey down a river in the midst of ongoing economic and ecological collapse. The film tells the story of a group of musician friends who, driven by dreams, desperation, and a sense of adventure, decide to build a boat out of scrap material. As they begin to build, more people gather to assemble vessels out of the trash surrounding them. Inspired, but uncertain, they set out down the river to make a new life for themselves.

Reid Farrington Brooklyn

Gin & "It" Gin and "It" has as its source ROPE, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film, based on the Leopold and Loeb murder. It is the story is of two young men who murder a friend just for a thrill. They then host a dinner party for the victim's friends, serving the main course on the trunk that is hiding the corpse. The film is projected onto a stage the same size as the original film set. The performers are separated from their backgrounds, creating multiple planes of video.

Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida Brooklyn

Room of the Sun is a video installation about Ivar

Kreuger, a Swedish industrialist who, in the interwar

years, capitalized on shifts in global financial markets to

establish matchstick monopolies in at least 34 countries.

Contemporary and archival footage stage the

relationships between capitalist speculation, collective

myth-making, and national identification through a

forgotten moment of 20th economic history.

Stephanie Gray Queens

You know they want to disappear Hell's Kitchen as Clinton is a letter-film essay to E.B. White, famed for his essay about disappearing Hell’s Kitchen which developers have been trying to rename Clinton for years. The film has imagined scenes that White perhaps was thinking about, wonders what White would think of this city today, and the fate of Hell’s Kitchen--or was it Clinton’s Hell…or Hell’s Clinton?

Experimental Television Center Finishing Funds 2009 4 Kathy High Averill Park

TransTamagotchi is an interactive website, which allows users to pick their “disease” type, and then

they receive a virtual “diseased” research animal to

care for. This project plays off care-taking and

owning a pet, but includes virtual pets based on

actual laboratory animals acknowledging their use

in human disease research.

Sawako Kato Brooklyn

Pocket Mirage is a portable, physically modulated video projection system using a pocket projector. It is something like a kaleidoscope, but instead of looking inside, the ephemeral images are presented in the world. With the system, the modulated images are projected from your palm onto trees or streets while you are walking or on the train. Pocket Mirage tranquilly lights up the darkness of cities.

Edward Kihn Brooklyn

Minutes From A Counterrevolution is a multi-channel video based on an installation. The work is an array of found films dating from the CIA's 1954 coup to topple the Arbenz administration in Guatemala. Models of time and space develop alongside cinematic and photographic technologies, within the context of political strategy and doctrine.

Barbara Lattanzi Alfred

Optical De-dramatization Engine (O.D.E.) is original software applied to movies. To date, ODEs have been applied to lesser-known film melodramas from the first half of the twentieth century. The viewer's experience of the ODEs combines perceptual extremes with extended durations. Finishing Funds will be used to revise and complete the software as it is used in future projects and in the current project, “Optical De- dramatization Engine (O.D.E.) applied in 15-hour cycles to Ma-Xu Weibang's ‘Yeban gesheng’ (Song at Midnight), 1937”.

Experimental Television Center Finishing Funds 2009 5 Thessia Machado New York

Interference is an interactive installation with small lcd screens that display patterns generated by oscillators. Light sensors, touch screens and momentary switches respond to the viewers and modulate the sound signal, altering the visual patterns.

Shana Moulton and Nick Hallett Brooklyn

Whispering Pines 10 is an interactive video performance revolving around the life of Cynthia, a reclusive and anxiety ridden woman desperate to find freedom. The work uses live and interactive technology and advanced projection design.

Diane Nerwen Brooklyn

Open House documents the brutal development spree that occurred as a result of Williamsburg, Brooklyn's large- scale re-zoning that allowed for 40-story towers on the waterfront. With images of a neighborhood being torn apart by developers capitalizing on a frenzied housing market and property owners desperate to cash in before the market collapsed, this video chronicles the transformation of a neighborhood on a scale not seen since Robert Moses' "slum" clearance of the 1960's.

Ruth Sergel New York

Magic Box is an object based on a 19th century illusionist trick. Peering inside the box one watches a film not visible to the other viewer. At moments, one sees into the eyes of the other participant. The sliders on the front panel of the b ox select which film is visible to each viewer. If both people move to the far position of the slider their hands will touch. Two strangers - looking each other in the eye, touching hands, sharing the experience of watching a film...

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Karolina Sobecka Brooklyn

Sniff is an interactive projectionin a window. As the viewer walks by the projection, her movements are tracked by a computer vision system. A CG dog comes up in the projection, following her as she moves in front of the display. As the viewer spends more time in front of the display more dogs will approach, vying for her attention or simply watching attentively. When nobody is present in front of the projection, the dogs play with each other, nap and exhibit 'natural' dog behavior.

Woody Sullender Brooklyn

Whispering Spectres is a broadcast/multi- speaker installation consisting of live and filtered FM radio signals, highlighting small, hidden musical moments that occur on FM radio but are usually rendered inaudible by other elements in the sound.

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